Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

III. Methods and tools
can be deeply interesting, as we see
Pigments
Kassia St Claire’s The Secret Lives of Color.
in
of us also take for granted that we can
Many
into an arts and crafts store to purchase
walk
set of oil paints, even though that is a
a
new innovation.
relatively
then there is Vantablack—one of the
And
blacks ever made. It absorbs almost
blackest
light—99.965% to be precise—so much
all
that some artists have described it as
so
from carbon nanotubes, by accident
Created
the laboratory of Surrey Nanosystems, an
in
and space science laboratory,
engineering
took the art world by storm.
Vantablack
was not widely available because the
It
had to be created under very specific
pigment
conditions, using a reactor and
laboratory
trained staff.
highly
artists flooded the company
Undeterred,
enquiries. Among them was Anish
with
a prominent contemporary artist,
Kapoor,
of Chicago’s Cloud Gate sculpture
creator
known as “The Bean”), who
(popularly
purchased the rights to Vantablack
ultimately
his exclusive use. Surrey Nanosystems,
for
from the technology world, may
coming
conceived of patents as a legitimate and
have
response to their innovation, and
obvious
the company patented the method and
so
protocols for creating the pigment.
laboratory
use of a technologically derived
Exclusive
is certainly not unheard of in the
material
world; indeed, patents protect
technology
incentives that propel research and
the
(R&D) in science, technology
development
industry. Without patents, the argument
and
organizations would have no pay-off from
is,
costly R&D, and so no incentive
pursuing
Surrey Nanosystems would find out, this
and
markedly different from the ethos and
was
technologies and material possibilities
New
a long history of inspiring new art forms
have
movements. And that these innovations
and
sometimes, or even often, not freely and
are
shared by their inventors is also not
widely
But something about Vantablack deeply
new.
many artists, perhaps none more so than
upset
Semple who, inspired by this episode,
Stuart
go on to democratize pigments. He saw
would
Vantablack patent as elitist and immoral,
the
access to an art material that could
limiting
art collectively. But Semple had been
advance
his own pigments and not sharing
making
and was struck by his own hypocrisy.
them,
so, he made his pigment, the Pinkest
And
available for purchase by other artists
Pink,
a very cheap price. This was both an act
at
sharing as well as a performance, because
of
sale was made on the condition that the
every
was not Anish Kapoor, was not affiliated
buyer
him in any way, and would not allow
with
Kapoor access to the pigment.
Anish
performance went viral, shared
Semple’s
commented upon thousands of times on
or
media. Anish Kapoor somehow got his
social
on the pigment and did a performance
hands
his own, posting a picture on Instagram
of
his middle finger dripping in the Pinkest
of
So commenced a massive feud. Semple
Pink.
with a few others set out to create an
along
to Vantablack, spending years in
alternative
and collaborating with the make-up
R&D
to create Black 3.0, not quite as black
industry
Vantablack, but pretty close. It inspired
as
artist, Diemut Strebe, who alongside
another
scientists ultimately created a blacker
MIT
than Vantablack, a pigment that traps an
black
99.995% of light. Until a blacker
astonishing
comes around, this one is available to
black
artist, including AnishKapoor.
any
10
Case study
Pigment feuds
expectations of many artists.
disturbing and confronting.
This did not go down well with the art world.
to pursue it in the first place. But as Kapoor
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